NORTHERN PLANNER

It doesn't seem to make sense, but if you want to get more done, switch off more. 

Take your body and mind somewhere else. 

It's so easy to become a busy fool, especially if you're in the problem solving business.

You can't escape doing the work, but sometimes no matter how hard you try, the solution refuses to reveal itself.

It's even easier in life to fall into the trap of doing more and more stuff. There's too much to watch in Netflix, too many tracks on Spotify and, well just too much.

Furthermore, culture is far more porous than it used to be. There is little about your age, status or whatever, that dictates you can't do this or that. Once upon a time your identity was fixed, now you can be who the hell you want to be, you can different versions of yourself at different times and it's not really a contradiction.

Who would want to sit on their hands? it's so tempting to just do more and more.

But.

If you have challenges in your life, the further away you get from a problem, the smaller it becomes.

If you can't crack that brief, when you take your mind elsewhere, the subconscious is still working. The less you try to think, the more it does your thinking for you. It's far cleverer than you too. 

So work hard, but don't work stupid.

I used to train for swimming every day. For about 5 hours. We never just pootled up and down, we did variations of interval training. Go as hard as you can, rest just a long as you need to do it again. Repeat again, then again and again.

If you go full pelt without stopping, you crumble. Sport it littered with casualties of overtraining.

When I started out, being over 45 was considered well past it. Some of this was wrongheaded worship of youth over experience, much of this was people simply burning out after too many late nights and weekends. The gun was empty and they just couldn't reload. 

So yes, it feels wrong headed, but if you want to do more, switch off more.